Miranda Chase

Chapter 7

“s**t!” Mike inspected the tear in his slacks that was letting in the Alaskan cold. And the blood that wouldn’t stop trickling from the cut on the back of his left hand where he’d scraped it against a jagged sheet-metal edge. And the ankle he’d twisted while slip-sliding over the thin coating of snow. And…

He kicked a piece of sheet metal that looked as if it had been run through an airplane-sized trash compactor. Another typical day on a crash investigation.

Still, it beat being gunned down in his office chair. Two years ago, and he still couldn’t credit his reprieve—con man to mafia target in a screwed-up FBI sting to NTSB investigator. Now that had been a wild seventeen hours.

that Instead of being gunned down where he sat, Mike had spent the last twenty minutes in the cold, chasing around the remains of the KC-46’s snow-dusted tail section in an attempt to locate the flight recorder. There were so many bits and shreds of metal that the locator signal had been reflected, refracted, bifurcated, and all sorts of screwed up when he used the detector.

The black box, which was actually painted a bright orange to make it easy to find, wasn’t being easy to find. It hadn’t been on its mounting pins in the tail section. Actually, it might be, but the mount was missing as well.

It took three-point-one million parts to make one Boeing 767, and he’d estimate this one had returned to the quarter-million-parts stage of disassembly. The reverse transition had been destructively abrupt.

He scraped a handful of snow from a bent piece of deck plating and made a cold compress against the back of his cut hand.

To the east, he could see Miranda and Andi returning from whatever had caught Miranda’s attention so far down the expanse of the snowy runway. There was still no sign of the afternoon sun except as a dazzling brightness in one section of the ubiquitous clouds to the northwest. Anchorage was close enough to the Arctic Circle for the end-of-May sun to carve most of a full circle around the sky.

The Air Force hadn’t plowed, swept, sanded, or treated the skim of snow. It had fallen after the crash. The runway was closed until Miranda authorized the cleanup crew to start work.

Landing on Runway Oh-Six meant that the aircraft had been heading sixty degrees east of north—runway names were rounded to the nearest ten degrees and the final zero was dropped for simplicity. He turned around to face the marginally warmer sunlight and look along the reverse direction. Two-Four had been the line of the aerial tanker’s approach. It was probably the cleanest approach to any of Elmendorf Air Force Base’s runways.

To the west there was a line of approach lights up on stands stretching twenty-four hundred feet past the runway threshold—the last three of which were missing because they’d been ripped out by the Pegasus landing short of the pavement.

Elmendorf sat at two hundred and thirteen feet above average mean sea level. In the mile past the farthest approach light, the land fell those two hundred and thirteen feet in a low roll down to the sea of Cook Inlet. The next land of any significant elevation lay a hundred miles away.

There the western end of the jagged snow-capped Alaska Range rose to seven thousand feet, well below any flight path the plane might have taken.

Courtesy of copiloting Miranda’s little Citation M2 jet, Mike didn’t have to think hard to work out the math. The KC-46 at a hundred miles out should still have been cruising at thirty thousand feet. A mountain wave of turbulent wind could reach the stratosphere, but was rarely of consequence past half again a mountain’s height. Any turbulence had probably been below eleven thousand feet when the plane was still at thirty. And the pilot would have had another fifteen minutes of flight to recover from any problems.

So that wasn’t the cause. He hadn’t crashed in those mountains or into the broad gray waters of Cook Inlet. He’d augured in ninety meters shy of the runway, skidding and breaking apart across the threshold of the runway.

If he was that close, he should have slid onto the runway. Sure, it would still probably destroy the aircraft. But not…this. Something far more catastrophic had occurred.

slidMike shook his head and scooped up some fresh snow for his hand. Weather hadn’t been the issue. Reports said the runway had been dry during the landing and the winds at twenty knots out of the north-northeast. Nothing of consequence.

His specialty wasn’t mechanics; it was people. He was the human-factors specialist in crash investigations, so what the hell had the pilot been thinking?

A grinding noise of metal on asphalt sounded around the side of a crumpled aileron that stood several meters high—though it had once been five stories tall.

Holly came around the corner dragging a section of the plane like a roadkill kangaroo. Prior to his abrupt change of career to air-crash investigator, he’d been living in Denver. Holly Harper was a tall, blonde Australian who’d grown up in the Australian Outback. Yet he was the one shivering in a parka and she was the one who hadn’t bothered to zip up her denim jacket.

“If you’re done playing around, could you bring me a ruddy wrench?” She dropped the end of the sheet metal she was dragging with a loud bang.

“Oh good,” Miranda stepped up and handed Holly a wrench. “You found the flight recorder.”

Mike looked down. Holly had. The traitorous thing must have eluded him simply for the fun of it. Maybe Holly had decided to tease him and sat on it as he’d struggled through the wreckage. He wouldn’t put it past her. She might share his bed, but she never let up. She insisted on calling it his bed, though it had been months since she’d slept in hers at the team house.

his She began unmounting the bolts.

“I’ve got the QAR,” Andi trotted over as if to prove quite how astray Mike had gone. “I spotted the avionics computer stack in a drainage ditch. The whole assembly must have been blown clear. It looks okay physically.”

The Quick Access Recorder was normally mounted beneath the cockpit floor with all of the rest of the aircraft’s electronics. The QAR recorded all of the data and audio feeds onto a removable drive. More comprehensive than the flight recorder, but also far more fragile. It was a superior source of information—if it survived the crash.

“I’ll—” He reached for his computer, but didn’t complete the gesture. Miranda already had her tablet computer out and was uncoiling an adapter cable to plug into the QAR’s drive.

Normally Jeremy would be given any computer tasks to do. Except he wasn’t on the team anymore. With the departure of him and Taz, the team roles were shifting but no one yet knew how. It was making for a lot of miscues in what had been a smooth-running operation.

Oh! He wanted to smack his forehead, but his hand hurt too much. Miranda, having lost the crutch of Jeremy, didn’t know who to hand things off to. Being Miranda, she was taking all of the load on herself, which would account for the ever-growing number of miscues.

“Why don’t you let me do that for you, Miranda?”

“Why?” She squinted at him, studying his chin. She normally focused on his left ear, because eyes were very difficult for someone on the Spectrum to look at. But his left ear was under a thick wooly hat.

“Because—” If I let you do it, we’ll all be standing here freezing our asses off for the next hour while you look at every detail. “—it will give me something to think about other than the cold while you continue to work on the debris assessment.”

If I let you do it, we’ll all be standing here freezing our asses off for the next hour while you look at every detail. She considered, nodded, and handed everything to him. Holly had finished freeing the recorder and set it on the ground. Miranda took back her wrench, pocketed it in her vest, double-checked that it was in the correct pocket, then led Holly away.

Mike perched his butt on the top of the small black box and plugged in the QAR.

Andi stayed close by. “That was very smooth. You are the master, Obi-Wan. You must teach me the ways of the Force.”

“You two aren’t having problems, are you?” Mike booted the tablet—but he didn’t know Miranda’s password. He unplugged her computer and fished his own out of the broad pocket in his tool vest.

While he waited for it to boot, he watched an Air Force C-37B land on the shorter runway. A sweet ride indeed, the newest jet in the Air Force’s executive transport inventory, the sixty-million-dollar Gulfstream 550 bizjet. Moments later, a C-130 Hercules transport lumbered aloft. The far end of the field was definitely hopping, but at ten thousand feet away, it wasn’t a distraction. Except at the moment of takeoff, the sounds rarely carried to them.

He booted his tablet, then tapped to load the QAR interface software.

That’s when Mike realized that Andi still hadn’t spoken.

A glance over said that maybe they were having problems. “Speak, young apprentice.”

were “As I’m four years older than you, I should—”

“But you know helicopters. I know people.”

Andi sighed and sat down on a section of the inner refueling boom pipe as big around as her leg. Normally, when still attached to a KC-46, the long metal tube extended from the bottom of the tail section to pump fuel into other jets as they tagged along close behind the aerial tanker. The force of the crash had tried to tie it into a pretzel and had come close to succeeding. It was pinned in place by the trailing edge of a broad piece of the port-side wing—the single largest fragment to survive the crash.

He waited. Andi was a former Night Stalkers’ helicopter pilot. By habit, she rarely spoke unless it was about an operation. However, as a member of Special Operations Forces for ten years, patience was not one of her strengths when the next action was hers to take.

Mike started counting.

“I keep screwing up!”

He’d made it to seven.

The second time, he made it to ten and deemed that the taciturn part of her nature had surged to the fore again.

“Andi.” He liked her. A year ago when she’d joined their team, she’d still been fighting with her combat-related PTSD. She’d let him see behind the curtain of her personal silence a couple of times. But did he like her enough to trust her with Miranda?

Not your call, Mike. Miranda chose her. He had watched for signs of Andi forcing herself on their team leader, but they simply weren’t there.

Not your call, Mike. Miranda chose her.“Andi, stop trying so hard.” The QAR software was loaded, he asked it to graph the flight profile.

“That’s it? Stop trying so hard? Like I’m supposed to be all Zen about this great relationship?”

Stop trying so hard? Mike tried not to glance toward Holly. The back of her head had appeared momentarily around one of the two monstrous Pratt & Whitney engines that broken from the wing and tumbled along the runway, landing clear of any fire.

Like he was supposed to be all Zen about his own relationship with Holly?

he all Zen A good question to ask himself later, as in after occurrens messorem mortis—after meeting the reaper of death. The wonders of a Catholic School education, he could consider death in a comfortably remote Latin.

occurrens messorem mortis—“Yeah, Andi. That’s about right. Don’t try to peel away the mystery, because it sure as hell won’t work. Be with Miranda or don’t be with Miranda, there is no true understanding between people.” He sure didn’t understand Holly, but he did like having her in his world. “There is only acceptance of her as she is.”

did Andi didn’t speak.

It sounded more wise than he’d thought it would. Maybe that would raise him from Obi-Wan status to Yoda status. And maybe he should listen to that himself. Figuring out Holly had occupied a lot of his thoughts lately, to absolutely no avail.

Andi still didn’t speak. Instead she stared down at the tablet lying flat on his lap for long enough that Mike looked down himself.

Then he saw what was on the screen. A flight profile should never look like that—except when it ended like this flight’s had.

In slow unison they turned to look at the section of wing that had pinned the twisted refueling pipe to the runway.

In his opinion, Andi said it perfectly.

“Well…shit.”